


Transient Dreams

by Reavv



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Genderfluid Character, Identity Issues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-18
Updated: 2017-02-18
Packaged: 2018-09-25 10:39:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9816191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reavv/pseuds/Reavv
Summary: Petunia Dursley will wake up one morning to a babe on her doorstep. This will not be a dark-haired boy with her sister’s eyes.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not actually sure how to tag this. I do want to make this clear that it's not a genderbend though, since Hyacinth has no real notion of a permanent gender.

When Harry Potter is born, there’s a second where the midwife is absolutely sure his eyes open to red irises, instead of the milky blue that all newborns come into the world with. It takes one blink for the colour to disappear, but the image remains. 

She says nothing, even if her hands shake a little more than normal when handing over the child. She proclaims him healthy, and leaves the cleanup for her apprentice. She drinks a bottle of scotch and tries to ignore all her years watching little girls and boys grow up in shame for strange traits, red eyes and twisted hands and teeth that don’t fit into small mouths. 

Magical deformities are strange, following bloodlines like some sort of parasite and disappearing for generations only to pop up in the most unlikely of places. The more useful ones get called gifts, metamorphmagi and parseltongue and all sort of other rare magical skills. But in the end it’s all just quirks in DNA, misfiring magic and mutations. Brought on by disease and spells and inbreeding. 

Harry Potter, the son of two very bright and powerful magicals, could simply have something like a small eye mutation, maybe some sort of Second Sight. Or somewhere in his father's line there might have been a dark disease that’s just resurfacing now. It’s impossible to tell. 

She’ll end up taking the secret to her grave when a Death Eater attack kills her and her eldest son. 

And the boy will grow, for a few months at least, into a happy and cheerful baby, with green eyes and black, messy hair. He’ll look like such a perfect blend of his parents that people will think, in the back of their minds, that magic has to be at work somehow. Dumbledore will take it as a sign, and their friends will take it for granted, and by the time they are under Fidelius and living protected from the rest of the world, the image of Harry Potter will be that of a perfect son. 

And then they will die. And Harry Potter will live, still his parents’ son, altered only by what the man on scene expects to be a curse scar. The child of prophecy now marked, as was foretold. He’ll bring the child to a quiet, mundane street, soothe the nerves of a cat-turned-witch, and leave the child there. 

Petunia Dursley will wake up one morning to a babe on her doorstep. This will not be a dark-haired boy with her sister’s eyes. 

It will be a blond girl, hawked nose and grey-eyed. She’ll look more like Petunia’s mother, with her father’s hair. There will be very little of her sister in the babe, and even less of her sister’s idiotic husband. She’ll scream, and then stifle herself when the child wakens. She’ll kneel down on the cold concrete and pick up the chilled child, tuck her under one thin arm and kick the basket inside. She’ll coo a little at the sweet and familiar face. 

When she reads the letter her eyes will gloss over the name and gender of the child, brain substituting them instead, and there will be a second when she thinks of stashing the babe in the closet. Her chest hurts, some mix of grief and fear, and she doesn’t really want to take care of her sister's misbegotten child. 

But the girl looks like her mother, like her father. And if she looks closely, she looks like Petunia herself. A forgotten dream flits by, of a young girl to teach, to guide. To grow up side by side with her son.

It will make taking in the child and caring for her rather easy, in the end. 

—

Hyacinth Potter is a quiet child. She falls into the shadow of her cousin easily enough, and seems content to help her aunt in the garden or the kitchen when needed, but she has none of the boisterousness of other children her age. Her aunt considers this a blessing, and her teachers call her precocious, and her classmates consider her to be part of the wallpaper but not, as some are, a target. 

Her cousin treats her with wary protectiveness, having grown up with his mother’s dire warnings of what will befall naughty boys who don’t treat their cousins with utmost propriety. He’s still rather immature however, and picks up on his father’s casual sexism to boot, so they can’t be called anything like friends. 

Some days, when there’s no one around to expect Hyacinth Potter to be blond and grey eyed and pretty in the way young girls would dread if they knew the consequences of it, she tries on faces like someone else would try on clothes. She reverts only once into Harry Potter and finds she doesn’t like the fit, too awkward for a body that’s grown used to regular food and only the recommended dose of exercise. She finds she enjoys the body of one of her classmate’s brothers’ instead, more solid than the others in their year and confident in it. He has hair the colour of freshly sodden dirt and freckles that climb dark skin, and when she wears his body she feels like she’s some earthen thing newly-planted. 

Sometimes she wakes up in the morning and finds some small detail of herself changed during the night. Her aunt suddenly finds blue to be more nostalgic an eye colour, and so Hyacinth goes a full month with the colour before she changes her mind. Her neighbour spitefully thinks that a child raised under the Dursley’s house shouldn’t be so picturesque looking, so she isn’t. People’s expectations of her change, and so she changes with them. 

No one notices. It’s like whatever version she is wearing is the one she’s always been. She knows she could go back to being a boy and her family would only slot her new gender into their memories like it’s an irrefutable fact. But she is sheltered as a girl, in ways both good and bad, by Petunia’s girlhood wish of a daughter and the neighbourhood’s confidence in her identity as a ‘Good Girl.’ 

It’s hypocritical, and sexist, and makes her feel slimy when gazes turn her way for reasons that she would rather be ignorant of. 

But she is ten years old and protected in this bubble of suburbia by knowing, before anyone else does, what they think of her and how they expect her to act, and how she can use that to her advantage to continue one more day in comfort. 

She wears pretty dresses and blushes when people turn her way, and wears dirt stained trousers and a male face in the evening when she wants to wander. She keeps her hair long so it can be considered a vanity and then has it short so she can chat with the older, more rebellious girls under the shade of an old oak. She’s an artist one day, a scientist the next. She gets in trouble if it looks like trouble is expected and gets away from it too. She is anyone anyone expects her to be, and a few more besides. 

She doesn’t really exist, she comes to conclude late at night as she listens to her aunt’s dreams. Her hair is bleeding red by the time the nightly images fade into some grotesque imaginations of her mother’s death, and she feels the sorrow/hate/disgust like thorns in her skin. 

She is some piecemeal mirror that has no real identity, just a mask for every person she comes across, and she can’t even feel any sorrow for that because she still, to this day, doesn’t know what it means to have one. She can’t understand something so fundamentally outside of her reach. 

That’s okay though. Every childhood is entitled to its fair share of existential crises and nightly terror at the void that is personhood. She knows, through the truly horrendous poetry of her peers, that all children go through a macabre fascination with the boiling anxieties of learning how to be people. She’s heard more than one teacher bemoan the teenage angst of their young students, as if they don’t too have fears of the dark and sleep uneasy for the clouded future. 

Hyacinth, who’s had more experience being people than she thinks most others’ twice her age do, tucks the dark thoughts into the corner of her mind and pays them no real attention. What does it matter that her sense of identity shifts from moment to moment like the changing of tides? She is transient, and formless, and she cannot fear the things that make her so. 

So she is many things, at many times. A daughter, a son. A cousin fit for soft dolls and pale dresses. A studious student and a rebellious friend. 

A wizard. 

Oh she doesn’t really see it at first, hidden as it is in Petunia’s fear and Vernon’s anger, but the shape of something becomes apparent by the time she is six. There’s expectation in her aunt’s skin, some sort of dread in her thoughts that’s tied to Hyacinth’s mother like an umbilical cord. 

She doesn’t really understand. Has no real notice of what is considered magic, and what is not. There’s the sense that she is different, but that has more to deal with the fact that her skin changes with other’s moods. 

But an entire world expects their saviour. How could she be anything else. How could she? 

There is a moment that shivers down her back when she first gets her letters. Addressed to Harry Potter, as if Hyacinth never existed. She feels her bones rattle, start to shrink. Feels her hair turn black and shorten, as if it was burning away into ash on her head. 

She remembers trying on Harry Potter’s skin like it was an ill fitting coat. She does not relish the idea of being him again. 

For once she reaches inside of herself and chooses. Chooses to settle the change into something that’s not what everyone else expects her to be. To twist her features into something that, although it might feel unnatural, at least feels right. It is hard, the hardest thing she has ever done, but she wins. She wins against an entire world and things shift, just a little. 

The new Hyacinth—Harry, is blond, greyed eyed. She has short messy hair and the dark colouring of her paternal line. She’s short, almost as short as Harry Potter should be, but bulkier, with more fat and muscle than he would ever be blessed with. She’s Hyacinth, and she’s Harry, and she’s her classmate’s brother with his earthen build. 

It is not an identity. Not one that most would recognise. She can still feel her shifting skin, still feel how a new face is just a thought away. It doesn’t feel like her, like any of her faces feel like her. But it doesn’t feel like someone else either. 

Expectation says a saviour, but she decides then and there, at the front door of a family that would hate her given a chance, that she might conform for survival but she will not play nice for someone else’s pleasure. 

She has the faces of thousands under her skin, and she won’t be caged by anyone’s desires. 

—

Getting her family to accept her going to Hogwarts is an exercise in frustration. Hyacinth was slated to go up north to a young girl’s school, something her aunt has always idolized and dreamed of. The idea that she will not, after all, fulfil Petunia’s vicarious dream is a bitter pill to swallow. That she is witch after all, despite little evidence in her childhood, makes it worse. 

There’s the ugly thought in both her adopted guardian’s faces when it comes to light. That she’s worthless as a daughter figure now, that they could never love something so unnatural. 

But she has had ten years of conditional love at the hands of the Dursleys. It is Dudley, in the end, that saves whatever relationship is hanging by threads in that regard. 

To Dudley, Hyacinth is always the damsel in the tower. She has never shown him differently, after all, since that is what he expects from her. When his parents argue over her suddenly shaky position in the family he protests, loudly. 

Petunia loves her, she knows. She made Petunia love her. She is everything Petunia wished in a daughter, everything Petunia wished she was as a girl. She is wish-fulfillment and familiar fantasy rolled into one. Magic could change that however. And a nation has thrust their expectations onto her. Magic has been thrust onto her. 

But Dudley is still too dim to comprehend that he should be jealous of her, not with the way magic is said as a curse and his parents whisper about throwing her away. So Petunia wipes away the bitterness of a longheld grudge and, very warily, agrees to send her to Hogwarts.

Which is good, really. Hyacinth would hate to have to find a new family after just getting used to the old one. 

—

There’s very little information in the letter. An equipment list filled with oddities and a book list with titles that resemble fantasy novels more than anything. Her aunt has little to say on the ways of wizards, and Hyacinth would rather not test her patience. So it is with a little incredulousness that she writes a polite and inquisitive note, signing it H. Potter, and sends it off with the first likely owl she finds. If she is completely honest, she does not expect for it to arrive at its destination. 

It would not be a hardship if that were the case. She is still sceptical about magic and its uses. What more could she want from life but a malleable existence living as she pleases? What more can magic do than what she already does instinctively? 

There is also the fear that these wizards will see the faces she wears and not understand that they are all her. That they might consider it a malady or curse, to not know who one is. 

But an answer does come, and when it comes it is in the form of a stern and steely-eyed witch. 

—

McGonagall has seen many things on her rounds as introductory teacher to muggleborns. Hostile parents, relieved parents, disbelieving students. Rich homes, poor homes, homes with broken windows and wheelchair ramps.

She has not seen something like Harry Potter before. 

“Please, call me Hyacinth,” the child says politely, as if McGonagall wasn't present for the naming at St. Mungos. 

“There appears to be some sort of mixup,” McGonagall says slowly, inspecting the child that should have been the Boy-Who-Lived. Dye could account for the blond hair, but not the grey eyes. The child looks almost nothing like Lily or James. 

The child holds up the slightly crumpled parchment of the Letter. McGonagall blinks at it for a second before internally sighing. If there is no mixup than that just means something else is at foot.

“Why don't we have a seat in the kitchen,” the child who’s supposedly named Hyacinth says calmly, tucking the letter away and showing her further in the house. The decor is mostly what she would expect from what she knows of the Dursleys, bland wall paper and a strict neatness that feels almost cloying. On the walls are pictures of the family, and she’s slightly surprised to see the resemblance between Potter and the family. And the fact that he shows up at all. 

As they rejoin in the kitchen McGonagall can’t help wonder at the change. It’s quite the stark difference, not just the feminine clothing and hair but the way whole features are changed. The narrower eyes, the hooked nose. 

“Tea?” Potter asks, already reaching for the kettle. There’s a few minutes of polite dithering on both parties before they’re left sitting across from each other, cups in hand and questions on both side.

“How common is magic schooling, exactly?” Potter asks first, before McGonagall’s questions can gather momentum and be asked.

“Pardon?” She asks, fingers curling over her cup of tea. It’s a bitter blend, and not one she’s familiar with. 

“I guess I’m wondering what use it is, for me. I was counting on studying science when I’m older, probably as a biochemist. Somehow I do not think magic will be helpful there.” 

Surprise flashes through her again, although she’s not sure why. It’s certainly a question she’s gotten before, although not usually by the children in question. It’s the parents who are less certain of magic and what it can do, who feel more secure in the things they know. 

This, at least, she has an answer to.

“Well, even if you don’t decide to pursue a wizarding career at the end of schooling, Hogwarts will teach you invaluable skills. It can be dangerous to not learn anything about how to control your magic. Tell me, have you noticed any odd happenings around you? Floating objects, things appearing out of nothing, a favoured item never lost or broken?” 

“Only my hair,” she says instead, and doesn’t bother explaining. McGonagall feels relieved anyways, fingers relaxing on her cup of tea. She figures she knows at least part of what’s going on now.

“It is quite likely you inherited a magical ability called metamorphmagic. It’s the ability to change one’s outward appearance, and it’s a trait that was passed down your father’s line. That would explain why you appear to have taken on the colouring of your guardians,” she says, finally taking a sip. 

“However…” McGonagall continues, “I must ask about your chosen form. I knew you as a baby, and I must say it’s quite the change.” 

Potter thinks on it for a while, hands cupped around his tea as if he’s getting something besides warmth from it. 

“How do you know what I was as a baby is who I actually am?”


End file.
